RaveBooklistLatina and Indigenous American women who long to be seen—and see themselves—are the beating heart of the stories in Fajardo-Anstine’s rich and radiant debut ... Sharing her characters’ southern Colorado homelands, Fajardo-Anstine imbues her stories with a strong sense of place and the infinite unseen generations that coexist in even single moments.
John Von Sothen
PositiveBooklistVon Sothen is both laugh-out-loud funny and tender, the latter especially in poignant essays about his parents, an artist and a newsman, who had him late in life. The problem, if it can be called one, is that even without fantasy, von Sothen’s Paris comes across as pretty fantastic, a vibrant, genuine place he clearly feels lucky to call home.
Mary Miller
RaveBooklistAs disagreeable and contrary as they come, Louis is a narrator readers will want to hug and throttle with equal urgency, sometimes simultaneously. Delightful at sentence-level, this is foremost the story of his sluggish-but-sure metamorphosis. Even Layla gets a second act readers won’t see coming. Miller, an absolute master of minutiae, relates Louis’ innermost self with poignancy and humor that never sacrifice an ounce of realism.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner
RaveBooklist\" Brodesser-Akner proves herself also a master of startlingly true invention in her enthralling, affirming debut of midlife, marital, and existential despair. It asks and answers if there’s such a thing as fairness, in marriage or in life, and if the story of a marriage can ever be told from all sides—or the outside. Shrewd and delectable, this would be a novel to savor, if it were possible to put down.\
John Glynn
PositiveBooklistGlynn, an editor at HarperCollins, writes the Montauk scene with brisk, detached tenderness, but it’s at its most personal that his memoir shines brightest, grasping at the many ways there are to love and be and ultimately revelling in them.
Nicole Dennis-Benn
RaveBooklist\"Dennis-Benn builds big worlds inside and outside of her touchable characters, writing through their knotty love in all its failures and mercies in this empathic intergenerational epic of womanhood and inheritance.\
Ocean Vuong
RaveBooklist\"In Vuong’s acrobatic storytelling, Lan’s traumatic wartime tale unspools in a spiraling dive, and a portrait of Trevor emerges in the snapshots of a 10-page prose poem. Casting a truly literary spell, Vuong’s tale of language and origin, beauty and the power of story, is an enrapturing first novel.\
Philippe Besson, trans. by Molly Ringwald
PositiveBooklistThere’s much book-to-film-star appeal in this moving, well-plotted tale: Elle dubbed it \'the French Brokeback Mountain\'; there’s something of Call Me by Your Name’s Elio in Philippe, who lives in the books he reads and writes; and actress and writer Ringwald ably translates.
Brian Raftery
PositiveBooklistFun facts and food for thought are in no short supply here, and some truly entertaining truths emerge in Raftery’s extensive research (which includes 100-plus new interviews with directors, writers, and actors). Movie and pop-culture nerds will relish this fizzy, nostalgic trip.
Emily Bazelon
RaveBooklist... excellently paced ... presents hope in the form of a new way forward, offering insights into reform-minded campaigns from a new generation of lawyers and scholars who prize transparency and fairness in sentencing. Though her evidence is grounded in research and case law, Bazelon’s prose is refreshing, accessible, and bold. Fans of Bryan Stevenson and Matthew Desmond will be rapt with attention and cheering on efforts to rebuild public trust with a prosecution system that aims \'to offer mercy in equal measure to justice.\'
Lydia Fitzpatrick
PositiveBooklistVladimir is in prison for the murders of three women. Ilya doesn’t believe Vladimir’s confession, though, and his time in the U.S. is quickly overtaken by...his private search to uncover the true killer. This mystery drives the novel, as Fitzpatrick reconstructs Ilya’s life in dramatically inhospitable Berlozhniki ... Beyond the brothers’ crystalline characterizations, Fitzpatrick gifts her intriguing debut with elegant prose, affecting images, and rich settings.
Candice Carty-Williams
RaveBooklistCarty-Williams creates an utterly knowable character in Queenie, who’s as dimensional and relatable as they come ... Fast moving and with a strong sense of Queenie’s London, this entertains while tackling topics like mental health and stigma, racism and tokenism, gentrification, and the isolation of social-media and dating-app culture. This smart, funny, and tender debut embraces a modern woman’s messiness.
Benedict Wells
PositiveBooklistWells’ depiction of young Jules’ grief and the magical thinking that comes with it will undoubtedly affect readers ... A love story and a life story, this rich and well-translated domestic drama acknowledges that some bonds are truly immutable in the face of, or perhaps because of, tragedy and that our memories and the stories we make of them, though they may change, are as real as anything.
Carrianne Leung
RaveBooklistStriking ... Readers peer through chain-link fences and discretely pulled curtains along with Leung’s vivid, quotable characters—and are reminded that life doesn’t happen between soap-opera episodes, cigarettes smoked at the kitchen sink, and trips to the mall, but during them.
Evan James
PositiveBooklist\"... the narrator of James’ debut guides readers through this mordant comedy of manners ... James is a fine writer, and his narrator maintains a consistent, ironically self-serious tone, skewering contemporary mindfulness culture and the pursuits of those with time, money, or both to burn.\
Bryan Washington
PositiveBooklist\"Washington writes scenes to live in and dialogue that’s practically audible on the page, giving his standout first book a novelistic arc and a defiantly satisfying ending.\
T. Kira Madden
RaveBooklistMadden seems to fold and unfold the maps of her life thus far, bending time to pin points together in wise and unexpected ways ... exquisitely told ... A tale of an artist’s journey that showcases the coexistence of familial love and complication with such shattering grace, understatement, and openness, Madden’s wholly original first book joins unforgettable memoirs like Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Melissa Febos’ Abandon Me, and Kiese Laymon’s Heavy.
Emma Glass
RaveBooklist...written in fluid, unconfined prose that calls to mind the work of Eimear McBride ... Glass, a practicing nurse in her native England, aptly portrays Peach’s real and mythical struggles between emotion and reason, power and trauma in this darkly arresting debut.
Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman
PositiveBooklistHindman, who now teaches writing, plants her addictive, confessional, and often-funny memoir in a fertile discussion of authenticity and Americanness in the aftermath of 9/11. The performances ultimately took a serious toll, but readers will note Hindman’s refusal to cast anyone as plain monster or hapless victim, and be struck by her grasp of the many ironies of her situation—chiefly, that it was easier to find work as a fake musician than as a real war reporter, which is what she most wanted to be after graduating from Columbia. Far-reaching, insightful, and unputdownable.
Ross Gay
RaveBooklistThe longhand in which Gay first wrote these (one of the project’s rules) seems to uncurl on the typed page, in winding meanders and meaningful digressions that share a life-spanning spectrum of emotions and experiences ... While Gay’s delights embrace the darkness of racism and death, en masse they share a profound capacity for joy and belief in humankind. This stunning self-portrait of a gardener, a teacher, and a keen observer of life is sure to inspire.
Tommy Tomlinson
PositiveBooklistOn this hot-button and emotional issue, Tomlinson asserts that he’s speaking for himself, but readers are likely to identify with at least some of what he says about addiction and holding himself back from life; trying to mute his inner radio station, \'USUCK-FM\'; conflating food with love and connection; resisting, even at 50 years old, becoming an adult; and not wanting to miss a minute with the wife, family, and friends he loves so much.
Peter Heller
PositiveBooklistHeller (Celine, 2017) once again chronicles life-or-death adventure with empathy for the natural world and the characters who people it. He writes most mightily of the boys’ friendship and their beloved, uncompromising wilderness, depicting those layers of life that lie far beyond what is more commonly seen: the fire’s unapologetic threats, the wisdom of the birds and animals seeking their own safety, and the language of the river itself.
Jen Beagin
RaveBooklistInventing situations and conversations that are off-the-charts in both weirdness and relatability, Beagin fashions an enchantingly intriguing main character in unfiltered, warmhearted Mona. This story of a woman embracing life’s what-ifs and her own darkness is a great read-alike for Melissa Broder’s The Pisces (2018).
Lauren Wilkinson
RaveBooklistWilkinson works within the true history of Burkina Faso, blending high-stakes political drama and Marie’s contemplation of the sister she lost and what her own choices will mean for her sons. Appealing in its insightful characterizations, well-plotted action, and rich settings, this should find a large audience.
Sarah McColl
RaveBooklistWritten with enough beauty to stop clocks ticking and hearts beating ... McColl’s resonant first book is resplendent with love, and the hope she finds in discovering that her unfathomable grief also carved a space for more profound joy.
Madhuri Vijay
RaveBooklistVijay intertwines her story’s threads with dazzling skill. Dense, layered, impossible to pin—or put—down, her first novel is an engrossing tale of love and grief, politics and morality. Combining up-close character studies with finely plotted drama, this is a triumphant, transporting debut.
Christopher Castellani
PositiveBooklistCharacterizations and mood drive this novel. While historical details about Tenn[essee Williams], his work, and his world bolster the story, it primarily belongs to Frank ... With imagination and feeling, Castellani reconjures history to reveal the intricate dynamics—loving and passionate, selfless and devastating—among artists and those who nurture them.
Mary Adkins
PositiveBooklistHeartfelt ... Though Iris’ death is the heart of her debut, Adkins keeps an overall lighthearted tone; hilariously hair-pulling emails from Carl and comments on Iris’ blog provide frequent comic relief. A natural read-alike for Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette (2012) and Rainbow Rowell’s Attachments (2011).
Mesha Maren
PositiveBooklistDread and a lush natural world infuse Maren’s noir-tinged debut as she carefully relays soul-crushing realities and myths of poverty and privilege, luck and rehabilitation, and the human needs that can precede criminality through love-starved loner Jodi and her band of fellow hungry souls.
Laura Sims
PositiveBooklist\"Readers fond of protagonists who profess to guzzling wine at nine a.m. will breeze right through this one’s bad decisions, moments of shocking clarity and cruelty, and—no spoilers!—total undoing. A dark and stylish drama featuring a self-aware yet unstable narrator.\
Kristen Roupenian
PositiveBooklistRoupenian has an ear for dialogue and a knack for satire, and she often tips her characters into dark fantasy worlds and even-stranger realities to get at their ultimate truths ... Curious readers will be rewarded.
Nina Stibbe
RaveBooklistEnglish humorist, novelist, and author of the delightful epistolary memoir, Love, Nina, Stibbe has a few words for people who love and hate Christmas in this little collection ... Funny, smart, sweet, and tender, this is greater than a gift book and readable any time of year.
Matias Faldbakken, trans. by Alice Menzies
RaveBooklistNorwegian author Faldbakken’s U.S. debut unfolds over five days inside The Hills, an Oslo establishment akin to (though decidedly not as grand as) the \'Grand European\' restaurants of yore: marble tables; uniformed staff; creased everything; snails on the menu ... Faldbakken, who’s also a visual artist, paints The Hills’ interiors, the waiter’s psyche, and diners’ interactions with a deep, often-funny theatricality. For those who love encapsulated novels with a touch of the absurd.
Omise’eke Tinsley
RaveBooklist\"Divided into three sections that correspond to the album’s songs, videos, and progression, the book seems to translate the visual and audio to another plane entirely, and will undoubtedly inspire much rewatching and relistening. Tinsley’s many lenses, both academic and personal, make for a rich and exciting study of the modern masterpiece she calls \'(arguably) the most widely distributed black feminist text of the current moment.\'\
Marci Vogel
PositiveBooklistShort but mighty ... Maintains a remarkable confluence of palpable mood, a capricious and shifting tone, and wise character studies ... An original and affecting tour of family, the calendar, and the days that bind us to both.
Annie Goetzinger, Trans. by Montana Kane
PositiveBooklistCarving a niche as the creator of gorgeously illustrated, well-documented historical tales focusing on women’s lives, French artist Goetzinger...gives voice to her muse here, incorporating Colette’s own words into the narration. Goetzinger’s fashion-illustration background again shines in precise, realistic, sensually drawn figures and a lush palette, fitting her Belle Epoque setting, while her page layout keeps all the pace and appeal of traditional comics-reading.
Phoebe Robinson
PositiveBooklistRobinson maintains a baseline of free-associating, footnoting, list-making hilarity which both disarms and readies readers for the tougher truths she tackles ... particularly poignant are her essays about money and feminism.
Nora Krug
PositiveBooklist\"Photos, pressed flowers, personal letters, historical documents, and her own illustrations and comics make up Krug’s mixed-media illustration style, with which she conveys significant emotion. Backgrounds and text are occasionally both so light or dark that her words are practically illegible text is often broken by illustrations in the center of the page, adding to the essentially fragmented nature of her search. A deep and affecting mix of text and illustration.\
Kiese Laymon
RaveBooklist\"...Laymon, now a university writing professor himself, recalls the traumas of his Mississippi youth. He captures his confusion at being molested by his babysitter and at witnessing older boys abuse a girl he liked; at having no food in the house despite his mother’s brilliance; at being beaten and loved ferociously, often at the same time. His hungry mind and body grow, until, like a flipping switch, at college he’s compelled to shrink himself with a punishing combination of diet and exercise. And that’s barely the start of his life story thus far, with remembered moments in book-lined rooms and smoky casinos, conversations that leap from the page, the digits on a scale, and scrolling sentences ... So artfully crafted, miraculously personal, and continuously disarming, this is, at its essence, powerful writing about the power of writing.
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Casey Gerald
RaveBooklist OnlineGerald opens his memoir by describing himself at age 12, sitting in a church pew in great anticipation of the impending Rapture. When the clock turns and 1999 becomes 2000 and he and his fellow congregants remain, is he relieved, or disappointed? Gerald then looks back at the beginning, as he remembers it ... Gerald pulls no punches in telling his extraordinary story, which he relates with unsparing truth, no small amount of feeling, and a complete lack of sentimentality. Painful lessons dart in and pummel his unsuspecting self, and scenes of startling intensity are often pierced—and pieced back together—by light and humor. Also an accomplished public speaker, Gerald will hook readers with richly layered writing on poverty, progress, race, belief, and the actual American Dream.
Jessica Hopper
RaveBooklist Online\"In the early aughts, Hopper was a twentysomething going to shows, DJing, and riding her bike in a Chicago that, in many ways, already no longer exists. This time capsule of a collection documents, in journal-like bits, all this in tandem with the growth of her career as a professional music critic ... Hopper is ever-quotable, gut-checkingly deep, and laugh-out-loud funny.
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Liana Finck
RaveBooklist\"For her imaginative coming-of-age memoir, graphic novelist and New Yorker cartoonist Finck has changed some names, including her own. Starting anew, with a brand-new title page several times throughout the book, \'Leola\' wonders what story to tell and how best to tell it. Early on, she introduces the concept of her shadow, a companion who guided her before disappearing when she was a preteen. Should she begin with her mother, who taught her daughter the benefits of shadow-companionship, or her father, who passed his unique weirdness directly on to her? ... A sure hit for readers of graphic memoirs, this explores feeling different while recognizing sameness in others and making art while embracing being a work-in-progress oneself.
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James Frey
PositiveBooklist\"If Frey can’t make readers forget his highly public literary lows, he proves he can dynamically reimagine his past into a page-turner, in his signature stream-of-consciousness style.\
Joan Morgan
PositiveBooklistMorgan...builds her discussion of Lauryn Hill’s seminal 1998 album...on a framework of conversations ... [that] encompasses a wide spectrum of opinions. ... The two-decade distance adds other dimensions, too, in considering how very young Hill was when she released her masterpiece (only 23), how meaningful her decision to become a mother at that stage of her life was, the unbelievable pressure placed on her, and how early fame affected all that followed for her. A shoo-in for lovers of music writing, who will appreciate DJ Beverly Bond’s included playlist of 40-plus tracks that wouldn’t exist without Hill’s influence.
John Larison
PositiveBooklistLarison gifts Jess with a strong voice to narrate her own story ... Larison...writes the novel’s many action scenes with restraint, and adds considerations of race, class, and religion to Jess’ realizations about gender. Larison’s western epic has wide appeal and is already in development for film.
Sam Anderson
RaveBooklist OnlineAnderson’s conversational prose and spirited chapters, grouped into sections, are a good match for his information-packed style. In the section \'Color,\' for instance, his layer-cake approach stacks racial injustice and civil rights activism in OKC’s history; Thunder center Daniel Orton, a hometown player, recalling a racially charged moment in his high-school basketball career; and Wayne Coyne, eccentric front man for the Flaming Lips and legendary lifelong OKC resident, convincing Anderson to help him add a literal rainbow to the city’s streets overnight ... Reading Anderson’s time-traveling, civics-minded, and thoroughly person-focused story of OKC, one gets the feeling that his research didn’t uncover a single fact that he could keep to himself, and his enthusiasm for the city’s singularity—and the implications of it—is beyond infectious.
Sharlene Teo
RaveBooklist...the pleasure for readers is in piecing together their echoing, diverging stories. On their own, Teo’s sharp characterizations and setting—so alive that the book seems to create its own, humid microclimate—would set this book apart. Add to that her imaginative plot, prose that turns from humor to devastation on a dime, and original storytelling, and Ponti is a beyond-promising debut.
Leif Enger
RaveBooklist\"Virgil’s narration is a joy: he lost his adjectives in the crash, making for their gleeful insertion each time he remembers one. Enger populates down-on-its-luck Greenstone with true characters—charming Virgil, his love interest, friends, and not-quite-friends, and even some wily wildlife—and gives them diverting plotlines aplenty, but the focus of his bright and breathing third novel feels mostly like life itself, in all its smallness and bigness, and what it means to live a good one.\
Lisa Locascio
RaveBooklist\"Locascio practically invents a new language, conjuring pure feelings and colors, for their sex, which casts a strong spell over Roxana until, almost as quickly, Søren closes himself to her. Simultaneously naive and aware, Roxana holds on until Søren’s darkness becomes impossible to ignore, and her curiosity about a Bosnian refugee whom Søren derides overtakes all else. This provocative, intimate, and metamorphosing character study vividly captures a young woman’s life-earned education.\
Diana Evans
RaveBooklist\"Evans zooms out to build her characters’ culturally rich backstories as they struggle to recognize their older selves and the relationships that have aged along with them. A probing, entertaining, and self-affirming novel of men and women getting relatably lost in the crises and hauntings of early midlife.\
Roxane Gay
RaveBooklist Online...Many stories hold highly dimensioned characters and unforgettable moments in under a few pages ... Dismantling the glib misconceptions of her complex ancestral home, Gay cuts and thrills. Readers will find her powerful first book difficult to put down.
Laura June
PositiveBooklistJune tackles both the instructive, such as making rules and routines for Zelda that free them both, and the revelatory, those thoughts of her mother and her mother’s illness that appeared in the new creative space that becoming Zelda’s mom opened for her and begged to be put, however painfully, on the page. Warm, wrenching, and full of light, June’s first book joins a spate of recent memoirs by new mothers that includes Meaghan O’Connell’s And Now We Have Everything and Jessica Friedman’s Things That Helped.
Beth Macy
RaveBooklistAlthough the realities are devastating, the doctors, the bereaved, and the advocates Macy introduces do offer hope. Hers is a crucial and many-faceted look at a still-unfolding national crisis, making this a timely and necessary read.
Hannah Pittard
MixedBooklist OnlinePittard’s fourth novel, imagines the lives of several Atlanta residents in the aftermath of a 1962 airplane crash, a true event in which 130 people, many of them among Atlanta’s wealthiest citizens, perished ... Readers follow several...characters, including the city’s mayor and his wife, each grieving the city’s incalculable loss differently ... Individual players can, at times, feel underdeveloped, and the story unfocused. Atlanta native Pittard fills the novel with historical details, local points of reference, and distinct examinations of race and class, though, making it an evocative and discussion-worthy choice for readers who appreciate vivid settings.
Ottessa Moshfegh
PositiveBooklist\"Readers might have trouble \'getting\' her, but there is one thing they’ll know that she doesn’t, given the time and place. Propulsive, both disturbing and funny, and smart as hell.\
Tara Isabella Burton
RaveBooklistThis fast-paced, stylish, dialogue- and character-driven debut from journalist and scholar Burton will definitively ensnare readers. Diabolically playing on what we think we know about others and what we reveal about ourselves in the social-media age, it will give readers the creeps, too.
Allison Pearson
RaveBooklistKate is by far the best part of a book that has loads of great parts. She’s brilliant, funny, and tender as she observes the new foreignness of her marriage, her teenage children, her workplace, and her own self ... Tackling sexism, growing older, and understanding one’s needs when catering to those of so many others, Pearson writes realism with all the fun of escapism.
Tommy Orange
RaveBooklist\"While anticipation of the powwow provides a baseline of suspense, the path Orange lights through these and his novel’s many other stories thrills on its own. Engrossing at its most granular, in characters’ thoughts and fleeting moments, There There introduces an exciting voice.\
David Sedaris
RaveBooklistSedaris’ family and upbringing have long been mainstays in his work, but this collection encompasses perhaps his most tender writing on the subjects yet ... For readers concerned that Sedaris has become too reverent, there’s also an episode in which he seeks connection with a tortoise via hilariously head-scratching means. Readers may think they know what to expect from Sedaris; they’ll be both surprised and delighted.
Sarah Winman
PositiveBooklistStrong characters, settings, and ambiance mark Winman’s unique and uniquely affecting story of love’s varieties, phases, and ability to bend time.
Stephen McCauley
RaveBooklistAs in his previous novels, most recently Insignificant Others (2010), McCauley delights with intimately, often hilariously observed characters and a winking wit that lets plenty of honest tenderness shine through. Readers will love spending time in these pages.
Melissa Broder
RaveBooklist\"In a banner year for woman-falls-for-sea-creature stories Lucy, a wry and lovable lost soul, tells a tale that’s all her own ... In her first novel, essayist, poet, and Twitter-star Broder wraps timeless questions of existence—those that gods and stars have been beseeched to answer for millennia—in the weirdest, sexiest, and most appealing of modern packaging. Brilliant and delightful.\
Lionel Shriver
PositiveBooklist\"Award-winning Shriver’s enthusiastic audience will delight in her clever and literary analyses of the spaces we occupy, and how they’re all too often no broader than a knife’s edge.\
Kate Greathead
PositiveBooklistMost impressive are the ways Greathead restrainedly shows her characters stretching at the seams of their own by-now-inherited restraint, and she paints their immense privilege with knowing nuance. Greathead’s smart and original take on the mother-daughter novel impresses and charms.
Sheila Heti
RaveBooklistHeti’s (How Should a Person Be?, 2010) novel of a woman pondering what’s perhaps life’s most essential—and most endlessly debatable—decision is a provocative, creative, and triumphant work of philosophical feminist fiction ... As her character seeks and ultimately chooses, as she must, the aspects of life and art she’ll lay claim to, Heti writes with courage, curiosity, and uncommon truth: \'To go along with what nature demands and to resist it—both are really beautiful—impressive and difficult in their own ways.\'
Curtis Sittenfeld
RaveBooklistMasterfully plotted and often further gilded with mirthful twists, Sittenfeld’s short-form works (half of which are published here for the first time) are every bit as smart, sensitive, funny, and genuine as her phenomenally popular novels.
Alexander Chee
RaveBooklist\"Though Chee, who now teaches at Dartmouth, in a very welcome way makes students of readers, his audience is in no way limited to writers. His quotable, pristine essays consider Chee’s family’s struggles, his AIDS activism and related losses, his tarot obsession, the labor of writing, the legacies of trauma, and the essentiality of making and having art. Hand to readers searching for something to follow 2017’s incredible parade of writers’ memoirs.\
Gregory Pardlo
RaveBooklist Online\"Endlessly introspective, wide-ranging, and lucid, Pardlo’s fearless inventory stuns with beautifully written, fully saturated snapshots of rich and complicated familial love.\
Anthony Ray Hinton, co-written with Lara Love Hardin
RaveBooklistHis memoir, collaboratively written with Hardin, is a troubling, moving, and ultimately exalting journey through the decades Hinton lived under the threat of death while an unjust system that refused to acknowledge mistakes failed him repeatedly ... Even more powerful than the crushing terror of serving a death sentence while innocent are Hinton’s refusal to be diminished by it and his unwavering commitment to forgiveness. Lighting unfathomable places, Hinton’s gripping story asks readers to do the same.
Ben Austen
PositiveBooklistAusten’s impressive study of Chicago’s 23-tower Cabrini-Green public housing project, razed but its legacy looming still, was conducted during years of reporting and interviewing ... Highlighting these many-faceted lives and the care Cabrini residents took to safeguard and improve their part of an ever-changing neighborhood, Austen examines the finger-pointing and buck-passing among power players that gravely impacted the most vulnerable occupants ... As the buildings’ demolition, completed in 2011, has left former residents in worse and more precarious situations, Austen’s fascinating narrative demands much consideration.
Tom McAllister
RaveBooklist\"Though Anna, who readers will empathize with and root for, drinks and behaves erratically, this is no new Girl novel. As for the massacre itself, focus stays on the victims, and violence occurs mainly off the page. Combining a deep character study, prescient satire, and an unfortunately all-too-timely evisceration of U.S. gun culture, McAllister’s well-voiced and remarkably observed page-turner is in almost all ways an anti-thriller—itself a comment on the current, terrifying mundanity of similar events.\
Domenico Starnone, Trans. by Jhumpa Lahiri
PositiveBooklist\"Lahiri, who also translated Starnone’s Ties (2016), once again treats English-language readers to the boldly entertaining work of the celebrated Italian novelist.\
Sloane Crosley
RaveBooklist\"Laugh-out-loud funny seems too trite a phrase for a writer whose takes are so addictively original and unexpected, but it’s also true: dear readers, you will laugh. Whether 2 or 20 pages in length, Crosley’s essays are complete and stop-you-in-your-tracks clever.\
Rebecca Kauffman
PositiveBooklistA little bit like The Big Chill, Kauffman’s quiet and deep second novel reconciles the responsibilities we carry and the secrets we keep with the outsize pleasure of being known and loved by a chosen family.
Nafkota Tamirat
RaveBooklist OnlineTamirat’s razor-sharp prose fashions a magnificently dimensional and emotionally resonant narrator, herself a storyteller who frames her own tale with beguiling skill. This debut is remarkable in every way.
Chelsey Johnson
RaveBooklistSpanning several eras, up to Andy’s present day, this is a coming-out and coming-of-age story; a surprise-I’m-pregnant story; a will-they-or-won’t-they love story; and an ode to a time and place we think we’ve heard everything about—and it’s all utterly fresh. Portraying Portland and Andy’s chosen family with feeling and immense charm, Johnson paints Andy’s love—for her kid, her city, herself, and others—in all its thorny nuance and surprising glory. Recommend this to Jami Attenberg and Rainbow Rowell fans.
Krystal A Sital
RaveBooklistBoth expansive and distilled, it is also transporting in its depiction of Sital’s ancestral island home in its vibrancy, beauty, and blight ... Sital’s tribute is staggering. Most piercingly, she relays with a detachment that reads like love the ways these women were fiercely determined to escape the formidable hardships of their past, foremost for the sake of their children, yet were all but doomed to repeat them. Sital’s bracing, loving blend of memoir and family history is not to be missed.
Molly McCloskey
RaveBooklistThrough Alice’s layered narration, which is memoiristic in its true-feeling fullness and analysis, readers catch glimpses of her mostly happy marriage and her nonetheless easier-than-expected demolition of it. But that’s only half of her moving and propulsive tale ... Perfect for fans of deep-dive character studies in strong, moody settings.
Uzodinma Iweala
RaveBooklistIn his third book, Iweala...delivers with immediate poignancy Niru’s struggles between rejecting his parents’ constrictions and yearning for them; between embracing his sexuality and believing there’s a cure for it, and that it should be cured at all ... Portraying cross-generational and -cultural misunderstandings with anything but simplicity, Iweala tells an essential American story.
Francisco Cantú
RaveBooklistRemaining as objective as he can, and without moralizing or sounding academic, Cantú offers explanations of the policies and realities that keep the border an intensely scrutinized topic of public discussion. The final—and possibly best—portion of the book finds Cantú, once again a civilian, becoming involved in the case of an undocumented Mexican immigrant. A heart-wrenching, discussion-provoking perspective on how a border, the separation of two countries, can tear apart families, lives, and a sense of justice.
Terese Marie Mailhot
PositiveBooklist\"Mailhot’s first book defies containment and categorization. In titled essays, it is a poetic memoir told in otherworldly sentences ... Not shy, nor raw, nor typical in any way, this is a powerfully crafted and vulnerable account of living and writing about it.\
Melissa del Bosque
RaveBooklistDel Bosque, a National Magazine Award–winning investigative reporter for the Texas Observer, chronicles the FBI’s discovery of a Mexican cartel’s elaborate scheme to launder money through the U.S. purchase and racing of quarter horses ... Del Bosque breaks up the complex tale into brief, fluidly narrated, suspenseful chapters. Fully portraying the many key players and following the intricacies of the Treviños’ sophisticated plan, the FBI’s race against other federal agencies and the press to crack it, the gut-dropping dynamics of cartel coercion and retribution, and the eventual, dramatic trial, del Bosque recounts a true story that reads like crime fiction.
Hanif Abdurraqib
RaveBooklist\"Abdurraqib writes with uninhibited curiosity and insight about music and its ties to culture and memory, life and death, on levels personal, political, and universal. He’s interested in what sells and what’s currency, how music reminds us of who we love or who we’ve lost or who we once were ... Abdurraqib’s poignant critiques, a catalog of the current moment and all that preceded it, inspire us to listen with our whole selves.\
Matthew Weiner
RaveBooklistWeiner’s award-winning writing and producing of such renowned television shows as The Sopranos and Mad Men is neatly evident in his quietly thrilling debut novel. Written in descriptive and illuminating scene-like snippets — though nearly free of dialogue — this one-sitting read concerns the eerily shared delusions of a privileged Manhattan family and a man who stalks the periphery of their lives ... The sense of doom is sharply rendered, characters are well developed, and their motivations are finely wrought. Readers will hope for more book-form fiction from Weiner.
Meryl Gordon
RaveBooklist Journalist Gordon again fascinatingly chronicles the remarkable life of an elite twentieth-century American woman … Readers interested in gardening, art, and interior design will drool over Bunny’s fine tastes, and her ease at fulfilling every one of them, but all lovers of biographies will marvel at Gordon’s portrayal of Bunny’s long life, and the significant figures who buzzed in and out of it.
Jeffrey Eugenides
RaveBooklistEugenides’ first story collection is gifted with the strong voices and luminous prose his novels are known for ... Stories probe aging and agency, sex and death, with Eugenides’ trademark wit and deadpan grace. Cunning, comic, and clueless characters hatch plans to restore their unfairly sapped potential and deal with the results—some successful, some unanticipated, some unsavory—while Eugenides captures the places they’re in, both physical and metaphorical, with precision. Early on, old friends wonder, 'What was it about complaining that felt so good?' Readers will enjoy lamenting that this complete and utterly human collection must, after all, end.
Eileen Myles
RaveBooklistPoetic, heartrending, soothing, and funny, this is a mind-expanding contemplation of creation, the act and the noun, and the creatures whose deaths we presume will precede ours but whose lives make our own better beyond reason. To this, readers should bring tissues, pencil and paper, even their dogs.
Danielle S. Allen
RaveBooklistAllen, whose writing is creative and accessible, uses her finely tuned talent to fold Michael’s fate into the gathering storms of the U.S. criminal-justice system and Los Angeles’ gang-related and racial turmoil. Both a searching, personal elegy and a sure-footed lamentation of the systems meant to protect us, this is a searing must-read.
Benjamin Rachlin
PositiveBooklistAn absorbing story ... In his moving first book, Rachlin, with confidence and care, relays both the terrifying personal costs and complex legalities, so dependent on fallible humans, of wrongful conviction and imprisonment.
Roxane Gay
RaveBooklist...it’s hard to imagine this electrifying book being more personal, candid, or confessional ... The story of her body is, understandably, linked to the story of her life; she tells both, and plumbs discussions about both victims of sexual violence and people whose bodies don’t adhere to the ideal of thinness. In 88 short, lucid chapters, Gay powerfully takes readers through realities that pain her, vex her, guide her, and inform her work. The result is a generous and empathic consideration of what it’s like to be someone else: in itself something of a miracle.
Kristen Radtke
PositiveBooklistRadtke’s neat, grayscale drawings are detailed and coloring-book precise, and her thoughtful, meticulous narration makes true visual essays of them ... n her cerebral journey of a first book, Radtke, an illustrator, designer, and managing editor of a small press, asks and answers: Why do ruins fascinate, and why is this fascination considered perverse? Why are ruins there at all?
David Grann
RaveBooklistGrann employs you-are-there narrative effects to set readers right in the action, and he relays the humanity, evil, and heroism of the people involved. His riveting reckoning of a devastating episode in American history deservedly captivates.
Julie Buntin
RaveBooklist...[a] vivid debut ... Though Cat tells her story in flashbacks, Buntin’s prose is emotional and immediate, and the interior lives she draws of young women and obsessive best friends are Ferrante-esque.
Cara Hoffman
PositiveBooklistIn leaving apparent holes or unanswered questions in her layered story, Hoffman is fearless and trusting of her readers, and her precise prose captures the novel’s many settings—Greece, Washington State, New York City—and her characters’ feelings and actions, vividly.
Elizabeth Winder
PositiveBooklistWinder effectively stops time and keeps readers drifting through a montage of Monroe’s ’55 datebook. Relying on accounts of those who made up Monroe’s 'blonde orbit,' Winder sometimes delves too deeply into these peripheral lives. Still, this sympathetic portrayal of a brilliant artist who was dying to be taken seriously is full of quotes, anecdotes, and impressions that will please the many who wish they knew her.
